Walking in power

For the Kingdom of God is not just a lot of talk; it is living by God’s power.
1 Corinthians 4:20

Do i talk or live it?

Walking IN his power is quite distinct from speaking about it.

Speaking IN and through his Word is different from speaking about it.

Lord, help me use Your power to bring heaven to earth, life to death, order to chaos, truth to lies, health to sickness, wealth to poverty, forgiveness to bittterness, hope to dispair, reason to contradiction, love to hate and faith to disbelief.

Source of Hope

Hope - a foundational aspect to cotinuing to live. Without hope, a person dies.

Now i am not taking about the day to day or temporary aspects of what we might hope for. But rather the hope of the future of our overall existence.

It's worth noting that Greta Thunberg is so despondent about the future, she has resorted to yelling at world leaders, at adults three times her age and haved a lived experience beyond her own. She acts as if she is on the brink of hopelessness.

So it is here, that Paul reminds me where my hope is sourced from.

"I pray that God, the source of hope, will fill you completely with joy and peace because you trust in him. Then you will overflow with confident hope through the power of the Holy Spirit."

Romans 15:13

So here i have Paul informing me, that my hope is married to my faith : 'Being sure of what you hope for and certain of what you don't see (yet, or that which will come to pass)'. Hebrews 11.3

I do find that my peace lays in the foundation of God's hope. That is a spiritual truth and revelation that a person in the natural can't fathom.

Lord, thank you for being the source of hope. Thank you for being my hope that never fails, never stops, never lies, never ceases.

Thank you Lord that i can take things into my own hands and have Your hope that pulls it together for Your glory, which is for my benefit and those around me.

Your will be done, your kingdom come. Amen.

The Best Friday

Friday 10th April 2020

Good Friday

Is it by chance that there is 1.3 million people infected with a virus that has gone global?

Is it by chance that the virus is described and named a Crown, the very symbol of authority and rulership?

Is it by chance that the world is on the precipice of further collapse, fear and death?

Is it by chance that we are here, at Easter, a time for the world to remember death, death of our bodies and soul? 

Is it by chance, that Easter is a time where we remember the Crown of Thorns pressed into the headship of Heaven, for our sake? 

Is it by chance, that Easter is a time where we remember the Crown of Life? 

Is it by chance that we are here, at Easter, the time where the Israelites would remember the Passover? Where the angel of Death, passed over the households that had committed themselves to God with the blood of a sacrificed lamb? 

Is it by chance that we are here, at Easter, with the Good News of redemption, restoration, hope, forgiveness and New Life? 

Lord, I praise you for your wonderous majesty and timing. Your mystical sovereignty that brings all things together for Good - your Good, which is my good, my neighbours Good. 

Lord help me be a vessel of your peace, your love, your grace and hope to others.

Fixing myself - period.

If you or i were to walk into a bookshop, you'd be greeted with a table or two of "self help", life guidance books.

"12 Rules for Life"
"Be you"
"Living Proud"
My 'favourite' and most subtle:
"The art of not giving a #%ck"

During my tenture in India, many of them cling to their gurus and sages, to get guidance and catchy 1 liners that sound very deep and profound.

Do this, do that, adhere to this, adhere to that....and then you will fix yourself.... a bit like this post.

The very basis of looking for fixes to our lives, presupposes that something is broken, or not how it ought to be.

When 100,000's of people pay money and take time out to listen to a Canadian Psychologist to find possible answers to problems we all have in the passage of time, is a rather loud alarm bell about our own awareness that problems within oursleves (and others!) exist.

But we know from experience that not all answers are right.

Defining the problem first, before looking for answers is needed.

Here's where Romans 10 is quite profound :

"I know what enthusiasm they (Jews) have for God, but it is misdirected zeal. For they don’t understand God’s way of making people right with himself. Refusing to accept God’s way, they cling to their own way of getting right with God by trying to keep the law. For Christ has already accomplished the purpose for which the law was given. As a result, all who believe in him are made right with God."

Isn't is odd that for almost all of humanity, we recognise we need a fix, a solution, perhaps even call it, 'to obtain salvation', yet for the majority of us, we want to define our own method of salvation?

In fact, for many we don't want to get right with God, but fix other peripheral, though important things.

Like the garden of eden, we want to define our own moral law, we break it and then go back to define our own solutions, that don't work....

For many of us, we are very sincere in wanting to fix ourselves.
But sincerity misdirected, is still misdirected and misplaced.

Thank you God, not that i am good or superior in knowledge, but that You have provided a path to fundamentally fix me!

[White / Black / Aboriginal / Male / Female] Privilege

We're all rather privileged.

Well, that's what the Bible informs me as such.

God gave them (The Israelites) the privilege of worshiping him and receiving his wonderful promises.

Romans 9:4 NLT

It's a privlege to be given the capacity to worship the ultimate reality, the ultimate Being.

How do you define worship?
To venerate, to admire, to direct your thoughts and actions to that object or person as due respect and honour.

Archbishop William Temple describes it as: "Worship is the submission of all of our nature to God. It is the quickening of the conscience by his holiness; the nourishment of mind with his truth; the purifying of imagination by his beauty; the opening of the heart to his love; the surrender of will to his purpose—all this gathered up in adoration, the most selfless emotion of which our nature is capable."

You see, true worship, worship directed to that which it is owed or due, is a spiritual experience.

Worship, true worship, as opposed to a perversion of worship, is like perhaps skydiving or seeing the birth of your child. I can describe it, but nothing can replicate the experience.

Why would God have us do such a purportedly egotistical thing?

He doesn't. If you re read Temple's defintion, true worship is the purifying of yourself, becuase you are directing your mind, body, heart, soul, strength, eye, towards that which is Pure, is True, is Holy and Perfect - your Perfect Heavenly Father Creator.

It is here that i read :

"..what are mere mortals that you should think about them, human beings that you should care for them?
Yet you made them only a little lower than God and crowned them with glory and honor."

Psalms 8:4‭-‬5 NLT

Worship is baked into our very being, becuase it is an essential aspect to God.

What a privilege us white, middleage, cisgender men have...or any other person regardless of what physical or immaterial identities they may have or believe they have

Doing Right and Pleasing God

Many friends of mine who are atheistic, irreligious or agnostic or even somewhat religious in another belief system, do "good" deeds.

They actually from time to time, shine a light on my own shortfalls of my behaviour.

I can think of one friend right now, who constantly does "good deeds" for others. He sometimes refers to these as feeling "quite virtuous".

Almost in a way of "doing right by the universe", if you will.

I want to note, he's not trying to show off, or get some level of acclaim. He was brought up in a Christian Protestant family and culture of scarcity and conservatism.
He's an agnostic, with a heavy lean towards atheism.


Here's a thing, despite doing good deeds, if the motivation of the deed is misdirected, then in God's kingdom, a.k.a the world we exist in, the deed is rendered worthless....

"Those who are dominated by the sinful nature think about sinful things, but those who are controlled by the Holy Spirit think about things that please the Spirit. So letting your sinful nature control your mind leads to death. But letting the Spirit control your mind leads to life and peace. For the sinful nature is always hostile to God. It never did obey God’s laws, and it never will. That’s why those who are still under the control of their sinful nature can never please God."

Romans 8:5‭-‬8 NLT

In reading Hebrews 11.6 it says

"And it is impossible to please God without faith. Anyone who wants to come to him must believe that God exists and that he rewards those who sincerely seek him."

Hebrews 11:6 NLT

If i read 1 Corinthians 13, the Bible informs me that "If I gave everything I have to the poor and even sacrificed my body, I could boast about it; but if I didn’t love others, I would have gained nothing."

1 Corinthians 13:3 NLT

When we "do good" there is a motivation behind it. It can be for a myriad of reasons, many aren't to please God, in fact far from it.

Doing good, especially towards others can be motivated by a love for them.

But if i don't have the vertical right, then my horizontal motivations for doing good are 100% misplaced. I have not pleased God at all.

Think about like this : you're married. Your spouse does lots of good deeds for you. But she doesn't love you. In fact she doesn't even want to really be in any relationship with you.

She has sex with you, more than you ever want. She supports you in your aspirations, laughs at your jokes, speaks well of you publicly.

Has she pleased you? You could argue, in the flesh, yes. But in reality, her motivation to have done these things, is vacant.

Similarly with my friend. He, in the flesh, is many times a "better man than i". If we potentially stacked our "good deeds" up and compared over our lifetime, i wouldn't be surprised if his tower was considerably higher than mine.

But that's not how God's Kingdom works.

It works on a loving relationship, where love, being a motivational construct, a verb, combined with faith, is the basis on living in the ultimate reality - God's Kingdom.

I'm a jack#ss. And i've got to get my motivation centred on Him, otherwise my good deeds do nothing to "please God".

Before someone gets upset about the notion of "pleasing God". Just think about it - God is Love. God sent His Son to die for us. God is for us, not against us, God forgives amd redeems us. If i take my cue of what love is, then i am left with no choice but to want to please God, becuase he is the locus of Love.
By pleaseing God, by loving Him, i am automatically loving others, my enemies, my adversaries, my wife and family. I am loving them in the format of 1 Corinthians 13.

Secondly, for those that listen to Dennis Prager, an orthodox Jew and very religious and guy. He is motivated to "do good" becuase God is good. He often states that he doesn't care about your motives, just your behaviour.

His pursuit of God is genuine. But his pursuit to please God through Faith in Jesus is not there.

It's such a missed opoortunity to have his good deeds count for something in the currency of God's Kingdom - loving and pleasing God.

Clarity on what is wrong with you and me.

Romans 7 brings with it a pretty simple and clear thinking explanation of how human life works and why it breaks down.

An atheist, agnostic, irreligious person tend to speak with conviction that there is no objective moral order or law, and reject the notion of sin.

Yet we use langauge like good, bad, evil, true, right, wrong, sacred, holy, perfect all the time to depict how we ought and ought not to live.

Moreover, so much of every day discussion is about what moral duties are we responsible for and to others.

The only way we " know " we have done a good or bad thing is by knowing what that law is.

And yet, even if we make up our own law, as Paul states in Roman's 7, we break it all the time, even though we don't want to.

Like a fitness regime, we set it up, and then over time, we let it lapse, even though we don't want to.

Here to me, is where Roman's 7 jumps out at me, when re reading it today :

But still, the law itself is holy, and its commands are holy and right and good.

Romans 7:12 NLT
The Law is "holy". That is precisely the point about a universal law : it is holy, by its very nature.

Holiness is God inspired, set apart, sacred, untouchable, innocent, true, good and perfect, becuase its author, creator is the good, the definition of good. Unlike God, you or i don't define inherent good. We just recognise it (like we do evil) becuase of our God given nature, the Imago Dei.
Goodness, is baked into God. God is the good, not outside of it, or subject to it.

Goodness is a personhood construct.

This is where my agnostic and atheistic friends diverge. They believe they can be the author of good, of their own holy law.

But they, like me are flawed.
You only know you are flawed if there is a Law to inform you as such..... and off we go around this circular discussion again.

The breaker in it, is God's recognised Holy law.

Thank God He has a law. Thank God he has given me a fix that i could never do on my own.

Read Romans 7 again. It's beautiful.

Rationale Universal Justification

If you didn't believe justice was a crucial element to the integrity of our existence, then a philosopher could very quickly show your hypocrisy.

Tied to justice is the pre requisite of a moral law.

Tied to a moral law, is a person or personhood.

Justice is a human personal construct. A turtle, a deer, a dog, a tree, an omoeba doesn't have the consciousness or capacity to know, pursue or create a system of justice.

Which brings me to Romans 8.

Many folks generally don't have a hard time accepting what i just laid out. In fact, most, if not all have said that aspects like religion have been the cause of so much injustice.

Imagine for a moment, if we lived into perpetuity.

Think of the amount of injustice building up and up, layer upon layer, brick of evil upon evil brick.
As far as the East is from the West, and then some.

Yet our innate desire for justice is still there.

How do we solve this in effect, unsolveable problem?

I'd like to suggest, especially to my irreligious friends, scripture seems to provide such a solution to this problem, in God being the only one who can provide universal rationale justice:

"So now there is no condemnation for those who belong to Christ Jesus. And because you belong to him, the power of the life-giving Spirit has freed you from the power of sin that leads to death.

The law of Moses was unable to save us because of the weakness of our sinful nature.

So God did what the law could not do.

He sent his own Son in a body like the bodies we sinners have. And in that body God declared an end to sin’s control over us by giving his Son as a sacrifice for our sins.

He did this so that the just requirement of the law would be fully satisfied for us, who no longer follow our sinful nature but instead follow the Spirit.

Those who are dominated by the sinful nature think about sinful things, but those who are controlled by the Holy Spirit think about things that please the Spirit. So letting your sinful nature control your mind leads to death. But letting the Spirit control your mind leads to life and peace.

For the sinful nature is always hostile to God. It never did obey God’s laws, and it never will. That’s why those who are still under the control of their sinful nature can never please God. But you are not controlled by your sinful nature. You are controlled by the Spirit if you have the Spirit of God living in you. (And remember that those who do not have the Spirit of Christ living in them do not belong to him at all.) And Christ lives within you, so even though your body will die because of sin, the Spirit gives you life because you have been made right with God.

The Spirit of God, who raised Jesus from the dead, lives in you. And just as God raised Christ Jesus from the dead, he will give life to your mortal bodies by this same Spirit living within you.

Therefore, dear brothers and sisters, you have no obligation to do what your sinful nature urges you to do. For if you live by its dictates, you will die. But if through the power of the Spirit you put to death the deeds of your sinful nature, you will live. For all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God."

Romans 8:1‭-‬14

https://bible.com/bible/116/rom.8.1-14.NLT

Postscript.

The irreligious, will have a hard time accpeting or understanding the term "sin" in the above passage. I can appreciate that, but it's not a far stretch to identify with it, becuase it means "to miss the mark".
Ever used the word "pefect" in a sentence about your life or someone or something else? In order for that to be true, there has to be a benchmark or target of what perfection actuall is.
In the moral sense, no one is perfectly moral. 

3 things on COVID

The COVID 19 situation has reinforced to me 3 aspects :

The clear and present universal purpose of our existence is : relationships.
When governemnts shut down the capacity to relate and give relational restriction policies, our ability to function long term, becomes untennable.

That mankind will not live on bread alone (but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God).
Material aspects, while good in of themsleves, shows that it has caused much unintnetional harm, as intnetional good.
We need for spiritual food, becuase we are spirit first, body second.

That we all have a death sentence and that ought to repriotise the most precious thing we have : our time.
Moses said it in Psalm 91 : teach me to number my days so that i can be wise in how i spend them.

How can God get angry, when He's God?

It's often been said that God is petulant, angry and vindictive.

Richard Dawkins has one of those word salads describing God in his book The God Delusion.

In Jeremiah 7.21-34, is a classic case of God getting angry at the Israelites.

So here's  a thing, if God is not anger3d by the child sex slavery, by the genocide, by the systematic corruption of governments... or the lies we tell about others, or the cheating on our spouses or tax returns, or the malice we do to others.....

Then what kind of god would they be?

Racism...?

You might be persuaded, Trump is inherently racist.

Especially as large sections of the media are spending very significant amounts of time questioning him on his reference to naming the COVID 19 virus the China virus.

AOC and many other Democratic part members have claimed that this has bread xenophobia and left Chinese restaurants in the US empty.

This is all rather odd.

In China town in Sydney, they have been largely empty for about 5-6 weeks already. And which ethnicity frequents China town ? Chinese oriented people.

What about MERS, the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome.
Or the German Measles or the Spanish Flu?

Are the media that stupid or that incompetent and bigoted, that their audience is unable to differentiate between the location of a virus vs the people's of that location?

Democrats are really Racist and Bigoted?

The Democrats are the most racist, privileged, sexist and bigoted group of voters - ever seen.

After espousing they are the party of inclusivity and diversity, based on the skin pigmentation, the biological sex, the gender identity, the sexual preferences and of "eradicating corrupt Washington and the rich", we now have the choice of :

one very old white very rich male from the Washington of almost 50 years
Or
another even older white very wealthy white male from Washington of almost 40 years, and has only worked as a politician.

We have Elizabeth Warren, who claims she was sidelined becuase of either her gender identity or her biological sex - same difference i guess. Similar to Kamarla Harris. Which is interesting that the Democrats didn't cheer when Sara Palin was the running mate of Mccain in 2008 or when Condelessa Rice was the first black female as Secretary of State.

We have Cory Booker claiming he was sidelined becuase he was black. Which is odd, given America had 8 years of a black president.

We had a hispanic, in Julian Castro demanding "transgender abortion justice", whatever that is.

We had a $60 Bilionaire spending $600M on trying to win votes. He lost.

We had Elizabeth Warren accusing Bloomberg of telling his female staff to have an abortion. Which is odd, given Warren supports abortion, doesn't see a fetus as a human (obviously) and wouldn't vote to make it mandatory that babies born post abortion that are alive, are kept alive.

To top it off Elizabeth Warren, claimed to be Cherokee, so much so she got a DNA test. It came back 1/1024 part Cherokee, which is less than the average American.

Now we have 2 very old men, one who is not quite sure where he is and the other who has never had a job not funded by other taxpayers, and now has 3 houses and is a millionaire.

Both are Washington establishment collectively of 70+ years.

The Democrats ran on being diverse and inclusive, anti wealthy, anti corrupt Washington, anti bigoted.

How else do you explain their current choices? Perhaps their policies do not make sense? Perhaps mandatorily taking things and rights away from others, in the pursuit of equal outcomes, a.k.a socialism, is a proven failure?
Perhaps stating that a 9 year old trans kid is going to determine who gets awarded the Secretary of Education, is a dumb idea?

Clearly they have proved themselves to be Clinton's 'deplorables'. 

Diversity

I was speaking with a genuinely authentic and well intentioned Singaporean women, whom i'd previously worked with in the same company, where she was a manager.

She is a performer, and is now a VP of a US based software organisation.

She informed me, she was doing a women's leadership post graduate degree.

So i asked her about the aspects to what levels, measurements and qualitative data there is that supports the systematic and structural suppression of women into leadership.

I inquired of what levels of nuance and specificity there was that supports the idea of the suppression of women to leadership, be it by country, industry or region.

She repeatadly said there was lots of data.

For instance she said of Singapore, only 1 in 10 women get promoted to leadership.

She said that the Middle East and Africa are leading the rate and promotion of women into leadership and positions of power.

I asked her which country's in the Middle East were doing this.

She said Qatar and UAE are leading lights for women leadership.

When i inquired about Iran, Iraq, Syria, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Lebanon, The West bank ( though not a country, but it wants to be as much) and Yemen, she was unsure or didn't know those places as being Middle East.

I asked her how does the data validate or substantiate that the reasons women are overlooked for promotion to leadership are becuase they are female or that being female supressed their standing?

I asked her opinion on the complexities of the wage gap and the differences of how men and women operate, prefer and strive to acomplish. I asked her if the fact that the majority of mining, engineering and construction workers are men and was this a problem? These jobs tend to get above the average wage, in fact well above.

Her response was unclear, she said maybe it was a problem (for women).

I asked her if the observation that generally, lines of business such as marketing, HR, Talent acquisition, operations are more female heavy, or that education, hospitality, childcare, healthcare have a significantly higher percentage of women, was an issue.

She replied that though true, this is a problem for women, becuase they are "service oriented" and not positions of "power and leadership". These are her words, not mine.

I put to her that i was unconvinced in most of her responses, as she did not provide me with any data beyond the 1 in 10 Singaporean women get promoted into power vs men, which i found far fetched at worst or uncorroborated.

Throughout our conversation, she kept answering my questions largely by telling individual stories of either women she met or stories she had heard of.
These stories were not necessarily about how they had overcome structural obstacles that were stacked against women, but largely about what they were doing with other women to promote women into positions of power. How they were all CEO's, MD's, Ministers, Heads of Ministerial departments, VP's and leaders in their own professions, with power.

She also kept referring to the main reason women get supressed is due to them having children.

She said i had unconcious bias.
She was unable to substantiate that claim.

I asked her if she had researched the unconcious bias test?
That this test is known as the Implicit association test, which was developed from the department of psychology of Harvard by a couple of professors in the late 90's and is publicly available to self test.
(https://youtu.be/ysnkoeGUnGo)

She hadn't.

I put to her, from listening to two talks on the usefulness of the unconscious bias test, that it was unreliable becuase of the wide variability of the test. That is, if you take the test 2 or more times, you produce markedly different results.

I did agree that we have unconscious biases, and for much of them, they are good biases. But that where we have an unjustified bias that existentially results in bad outcomes, then it does need addressing.

I put to her for instance, that data showing the wage gap, is unhelpful, such as the UK Department of Labor.
(https://gender-pay-gap.service.gov.uk/)


In the UK, businesses with 250 or more employees or more, have to provide the wages and sex each year.
The government then releases a generalised report that averages out the hours worked and wages paid and compares them by male and female.

I suggested that this data set is quite useless becuase it doesn't take into account the complexies and nuances of work and wages. I said Dr Jordan Peterson from the Uni of Tonoto, has studied these facets quite intimately and puts that there are about 19 or so variations to take into consideration.
(https://youtu.be/aMcjxSThD54)

She said that i was using this data to suit my own bias.

I asked her again, why was i being biased and she was not, where she was unable to explain the meta data of her studies. For instance, how does a female know she has been overlooked for a leadership position, BECAUSE she is a she and not a he? How does the data used, substabtiate that?

I have no doubt and have seen first hand, where there is a culture of not considering women in the same equivalency as men.
Japan comes to mind.

Ironically, Japan is one of the most polite and courteous cultures around Asia. Korea is similar

However, my observarion and discussion with an APAC colleague in HR, is that men in some groups have an unjustified bias towards hiring men.
However, women would do well to help themselves a lot. There isn't something misogynistic going on. There is a cultural imbalance, but nothing that a Japanese woman, in todays tight hiring market, can't navigate with perserverance and dedication.
It's similar for men. Men fight, compete and strive to achieve and overcome their colleagues and candidates. Leadership and power are not soley a male vs female issue. Power is not handed to men becuase they are men in corporate situations in modern markets.
Does it happen from time to time? Of course. But it's not ipso facto that men are put into leadership, BECAUSE they are men.

How many men are the lead editors of women's magazines?

I have never sat in a promotion or selection meeting and heard staffers say or even slightly infer the associate should get a promotion or be selected becuase they are a male.

But here's my current thinking - women tend to be more relationally and story oriented, men tend to be more number, object and functionally oriented.
My friend spoke pretty much uniformely in story telling and relating to other women she met.

It was largely how she felt. As i listened and listened, and tried to unpack her responses to my questions, it dawned on me that perhaps her highest priority was the journey, and not the data to support the context of the journey?

She referred back to many times of this course helping her to feel good about doing something to get women into power.

The other reflection that i had on our conversation was her constant and repeated use of the word "power" and a women's pursuit of it, almost as if it was the goal itself.
That is to say, the context of being in power was not very well articulated, or articulated at all.

And i think this is a really important point, becuase without giving context for why a gender should or ought to pursue power in of itself, is either misguided and on the other end, dangerous.

The way i think about this, is that men pursuing power, for the sake of control and what power brings, as we have seen, can usher in egregious effects. Same too with women.

That is, both sexes are deeply flawed and accessing power exacerbates bad effects.

However in my conversation with my friend, it came across as ipso facto, having more women in power will by virtue of their XX chromosome, usher in a higher or more moral or superior outcome.

I am unconvinced.

Now there is a growing set of data that comes to the conclusion that more women in a business, makes for higher profits.
One Mckinsey study i saw from a colleague doing his MBA and a sub project on the financial impact of women, showed that for every 10% more women in the company, the profitability rises commensurately by 2-4%.
(https://www.ft.com/content/1bc22040-1302-11e7-80f4-13e067d5072c)

The implication being : immediately stop hiring men and hire only women, as this will increase your bottom line. This is identity politics, and comprehensively disregards actual individual behaviour or competencies.

Where i reflect upon what my role or responsibility is, as a leader, is to enable others to be better, to unlock their potential through motivation and capabilities, to help them align their skills and desires with more options into the future.
And in that framework, be a leader that serves them, be they any gender.

Having worked in a company that from the bottoms up, is about the contest and markeplace of ideas. I have experienced first hand how diversity of POV and respectfully challenging inputs, creates better results and stronger teaming.

But i don't see them through a lens of gender or say sexual preference. As if who you sleep with or wether you have X or Y chromosomes is relevant to the battle of ideas.

But where gender can help is recognising that men and women bring different life expectations, hopes, experiences to the fore. Moreover it is proven that men and women think and process ideas differently, along with the nuances within the same sex.

How men and women work together also ushers in different working cultures and behaviours, which can be beneficial.

Just watch the differences where you have a single gender meeting vs one with both.

I think where i get unsettled with women's leadership courses, is that in some ways, it would be superior to have leadership training that encapsulates how to make great leaders for men and women, capturing their specific differences as men and women that enhance the opposite sex.
Moreover, from what i can tell and anecdotally researched, these women courses are more or less, run by women, constructed by women, networked between women and have women facilitating, wth the odd man come into speak about women leadership.
The Claymore Institute on Gender Studies, from Standford is an atypical example of this situation.

That is, men, who are seemingly the major obstacle to women leadership and getting into powerful positions are left off.

I turn over in my mind questions such as :

Have we (men and women) done a poor job at being better leaders?

What level of personal responsibility comes into play?

What augmented support is needed where it doesn't disenfranchise others unduly?

Why are we fixated on numbers, devoid of the context?

Am i doing the right things to help build others up?

What culture has gone into the person and their worldview?

My other question is, the way we enhance women in the workplace might be good but the means by how we do it, are not?

How we enhance men to be great leaders appreciating their characteristics and vice versa for women?

Socialism

American Politics

For a country that is the bastian of freedom, entrepreneurship, individual responsibility, it is fascinating that a 79 year old socialist is likely to be the lead presidential candidate in the up coming election.

Amazing.

Bernie Praises Murderous Communist Dictator Fidel Castro: ‘Had Massive Literacy Program’
https://www.dailywire.com/news/bernie-praises-murderous-communist-dictator-fidel-castro-had-massive-literacy-program

Illegal Colonialisation

Illegal Colonialisation

What universal moral law existed when other peoples, kingdoms or country's were colonising other regions of land?

How is land and property ownership a universal right?

Communisim certainly doesn't have that - in fact it has it as the opposite?

Atheism has nothing to say in this matter? Far less about what is owed or owned. 

Do I hate the impure things in my life?

Do i hate the impure things in my life?

It's a darn good question that i'd prefer to tell myself "hey, how about you distract yourself from answering that question?"

It might cause me to think about the sin in my life, especially the kind that causes grief on others and God.